Search Terms

Operators

Exact search. Allows a search term to include spaces. Everything placed inside a pair of quotation marks is treated as one, whole term (wildcard characters are still interpreted as wildcards).

Question Mark (?), Underscore (_)

Wildcard. Can match any single character.

Asterisk (*), Percentage Sign (%)

Wildcard. Can match any sequence of characters (including none).

Subtraction Sign (-)

Exclusion. When placed before a term, prevents search results from including that term.

Colon (:)

Indicates the use of a namespace which specifies a tag in more detail. Can also be used to search based on gallery uploaders in the format of uploader:"NameGoesHere".

Dollar Sign ($)

Add at the end of a search term to do an exact search for the tag rather than searching all tags that start with the term.

Examples

comic*xo*4

The above search would match anything that starts with "comic" and is (eventually) followed by "xo" which is also (eventually) followed by a "4".

At the absolute minimum, this search could match "comicxo4". It could also match "Comic XO 2008 Vol 24" or "Comic XO 2thousand ten Vol.41" or any number of other strings.

"comic aun" -2007 -2008

For a default search including both titles and tags, this will match anything that has "comic" followed by a space followed by "aun" (the exact quoted string) in the tags or in the title but that doesn't also have "2007" or "2008" in the tags or in the title.

The matches for "comic aun" and "2007" or "2008" do not both have to occur in the title or in the tags; if "comic aun" is a tag on a gallery that has "2008" in the title, that gallery would not show up in the results of this search.

comic -"comic aun*2008"

This will match anything that has "comic" in the tags or in the title but that doesn't also have "comic" followed by a space followed by "aun" (eventually) followed by "2008" in the tags or in the title.

Search Limitations

Searches may only be performed once every 3 seconds.

Searches with only exclusions are not permitted.

A maximum of 8 terms will be used to search. Any extra terms will be ignored.

Any alphanumeric term under 3 characters (besides "3d") will be ignored unless a non-misc namespace is included.

It is possible to search with single characters from East-Asian languages such as Japanese.

If tag searching is enabled, common terms such as "the" will be ignored unless they are made part of a larger term (either by using quotes or a wildcard).

Search results are capped at 200,000 regardless of options or terms used.

Certain keywords are blocked and will yield no results; this is intentional.

It does not count as a positive search term; including only exclusions along with one will not work.

Search Quirks

Title matches effectively perform as if the English title and the Japanese title were part of a single string.

This means that a search for "book*2004" or "book?2004" (but not "book2004") would return a gallery with the English title "2004 Book" and the Japanese title "2004本" even though neither title taken alone actually matches that search.

Certain Unicode characters are not processed well by the search engine, possibly returning a match for the wrong character.[1] Using 2+ characters together will reduce the chances of getting a wrong match.

The search engine finds matches differently for gallery titles and for tags.

For titles the engine may attempt a match anywhere, even in the middle of a word.

A search for "berry" could match a title "Berry Blue" or "Strawberry".

For tags the engine will only attempt a match on the whole tag (from the start of the tag) or on a word in the tag (from the beginning of the word).

A search for "berry" could match a tag "berry blue" but not "strawberry".

A search for "I*berry" or "st*berry" would match the tag parody:i my me strawberry eggs. The former matches the whole tag and the latter matches a word in the tag. The search "my*berry" would not since that string cannot match the whole tag or an individual word.

File Search

The file search interface allows users to find galleries containing images that match or are similar to a given image via upload. Only 1 file can be searched at a time. The uploaded file is NOT stored on the servers. After the initial file search results may be further filtered by way of a bare-bones search interface.

Searches for exact image matches operate by taking the SHA-1 hash of the uploaded file and comparing it to the database of all images in the galleries. Monotone (usually black and white) images will not work on Similarity Scan. Newly created galleries do not have their files indexed in real time

File Search Options

Use Similarity Scan

Enabled by default.

Searches for non-exact matches; better for finding different resolutions, sharpness, or quality.

Only Search Covers

Will only compare the uploaded image to the first images of each gallery.